But so far from perishing in the flower of his age, Fritz Brunner had the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead.  And as the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia’s poison had undermined his system.  For ten whole years he had supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing!  The innkeeper was a second ruin of Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by travelers’ hotel bills, much as the remains of the castle of Heidelberg itself are repaired to sustain the enthusiasm of the tourists who flock to see so fine and well-preserved a relic of antiquity.

At Frankfort the disappointment caused as much talk as a failure.  People pointed out Brunner, saying, “See what a man may come to with a bad wife that leaves him nothing and a son brought up in the French fashion.”

In Italy and Germany the French nation is the root of all evil, the target for all bullets.  “But the god pursuing his way——­” (For the rest, see Lefranc de Pompignan’s Ode.)

The wrath of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel de Hollande fell on others besides the travelers, whose bills were swelled with his resentment.  When his son was utterly ruined, Gideon, regarding him as the indirect cause of all his misfortunes, refused him bread and salt, fire, lodging, and tobacco—­the force of the paternal malediction in a German and an innkeeper could no farther go.  Whereupon the local authorities, making no allowance for the father’s misdeeds, regarded him as one of the most ill-used persons in Frankfort-on-the-Main, came to his assistance, fastened a quarrel on Fritz (une querelle d’Allemand), and expelled him from the territory of the free city.  Justice in Frankfort is no whit wiser nor more humane than elsewhere, albeit the city is the seat of the German Diet.  It is not often that a magistrate traces back the stream of wrongdoing and misfortune to the holder of the urn from which the first beginnings trickled forth.  If Brunner forgot his son, his son’s friends speedily followed the old innkeeper’s example.

Ah! if the journalists, the dandies, and some few fair Parisians among the audience wondered how that German with the tragical countenance had cropped up on a first night to occupy a side box all to himself when fashionable Paris filled the house,—­if these could have seen the history played out upon the stage before the prompter’s box, they would have found it far more interesting than the transformation scenes of The Devil’s Betrothed, though indeed it was the two hundred thousandth representation of a sublime allegory performed aforetime in Mesopotamia three thousand years before Christ was born.